SK hynix to place custom tiny CPU cores in its SSD controllers to ease Arm load as drive speeds rocket
SK hynix detailed H-TPU, tiny in-house cores that offload routine I/O from the Arm CPUs in its next enterprise SSD controllers.
SK hynix is developing a custom, tiny Hynix Transaction Processing Unit (H-TPU) to replace power-hungry CPU cores in its SSD controllers, aiming to ease the load as drive speeds increase. The H-TPU would handle repetitive I/O tasks within an SSD, while a traditional Arm CPU manages management functions. The new cores are claimed to be 2.5% of a general-purpose CPU's power and 4% of its area.
SK hynix plans to apply the H-TPU across its NAND products, including enterprise SSD controllers. The company's VP of SoC design, Koo In-jae, stated that SSD controller CPUs are at their power and area limits. The H-TPU operates on a four-stage, in-order pipeline and is programmable with a dedicated compiler for specialized code.
It is not designed to replace the CPU but rather to offload repetitive tasks, such as read and write command processing, metadata management, and buffer control. The H-TPU is expected to enhance storage control by handling 100+ detailed functions through dozens of small TPUs, with each H-TPU specialized in a particular job. The main CPU still manages error recovery, exception handling, and storage-policy management.
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